Wow Wanda – you managed to “make” all things didn’t you? And in pink tones with all trims and such in green!

First I love the cupcake pan done in pink – duh!!! I use those things for sorting all the time and mine are all the plain ordinary silvertone. PAINT them – brilliant. And then fill them with great things. Nope haven’t unwrapped/unwound all these great items yet. You really loaded me on my fav color of green too! Thank you.

Then the house frame – how did you know I have two sitting staring at me – not house shaped, just rectangles. I love filling mini displays, lol. And I have an addiction to rick rack for sure…

The heart with the silhouttes – yep I am addicted lately to silhouettes. And finally the clothes pins painted pink – I have a thing for clothes pins, lol. And you rolled them with more versions of green trims!

I had signed up for a great ezine this time – Cupids workshop by Lisa Pace. Its done but such good ideas. This is just one of them!

This is my interpretation of the heart pockets. Lisa’s is beautiful but since I am shipping mine I left off the paper flowers she glued on. Also I want mine to last a LONG time so no glue in the process for me (although there are some really good fabric glues out there that should work too) so I hand embroidered (did the big letters with chain stitch, the little with split stitch) the words and machine sewed my hearts together. For the machine sewing I used a double stitch and I used another Superior Thread that is varigated.

These are STUFFED now with candy hearts (ok dove chocolate and Reeces hearts) and iTune cards. (Teenage girls are very easy to shop for I think – they ALWAYS want itune cards for instance.) So – that is why they are somewhat odd shaped? And hopefully you can see the HEART shaped button on Suzanne’s heart (for sweet HEART, get it?).

Also I lucked out at some point and found a victorican scroll rotary blade by Fiskers. I used that to cut the inside heart. I didn’t ant to try to work the outside heart to match so I just cut those plain. Lisa used pinking shears on both hers – and its beautiful but I like rotary cutters and can’t figure out where my pinking blade is at the moment. So this worked out well I think.

Lisa did the hand embroidery on hers – in the same color tone as the heart itself so it was hard to see the word. I did my embroidery floss to match the back heart instead (did the big letters with chain stitch, the little with split stitch). Also rather than just the word LOVE on mine I chose to pick a word with the same first letter as each niece. Easy for Laura – Love. Came up with Sweetheart for Suzanne and by replacing the heart word with a button heart I figure it works. For Emily – well thats a tough one so I went with Enjoy!

The backs have a similar button on them for each. Can’t have those plain right?

Have you seen the new blog by Moda designers? Ok so I have resisted the Moda pre-cut strips and squares. Well with this they have hooked me! Its nice to see these ideas PUBLISHED. and I love things that hook over door handles – reminds me of May Day baskets we used to hang when I was very young on neighbor’s doors.

So this is how my latest batch came out:

I used the heart yo yo from Clover instead of a regular round yo-yo…just liked it better.

Also I bought valentine ribbon with words on it at Michaels and either doubled it or lined it with a satin ribbon. Sela’s is a cute pink and brown ribbon that says Happy Valentines Day. Jackson’s says hugs & kisses. Eli’s says Love.

And rather than have the 3 pearl drops I went with photos in soldered glass for the bottom of the holders – just in case their parents (my B and SIL) don’t know who’s is whose.

The link to the project is at the beginning of this entry. Here are the earlier ones I sent Wanda for her sons…

And then I did a heart game of tic tac toe! So cute and SIMPLE. Found this idea at Make and Takes. But I cut my heart out of felt and used a great rotary cutting blade that is called victorian edge.

So, my partner was Wanda! This time I actually PHOTO’d what I sent. I never do and I ask for photos but never seem to get them from my swap partners. I try always to post what I get (at least part) so they can get photos if they need them. But I know I don’t always remember either so I thought this time I would actually PHOTO them myself!

I made two things in this photo – can you tell which? Well actually 3 things – two are the “same”. I mad the valentines day door hangers…aren’t they cute? And I made the bird! I am in the process of making a few more of each of these so I will explain them later except to say Wanda has two sons so thus the two bags and the bird has wire so can be attached to say a curtain rod for SPRING! Now the ribbons in the photos – those velvets DO gradate…isn’t it beautiful? They are vintage…very vintage. And the cake and candy ribbons – those are not vintage but hard to come by. I will have to post the designer’s blog here – she does GREAT work! Piecemakers now has the cake ribbon but with a pink background – Renaissance Ribbons carries this line now. Oh please notice I did hearty yo-yos on the boy’s door hangers (which can be stuffed with fun items for valentines!). The final item in the photo are the heart and cupid sticks. (No the red fabric was NOT part of the present – it was my background for the package items.)

Items in this photo – two fabric pieces – I went patriotic since Wanda’s husband is in the US Army! The left fabric is a repro of an 1800 type fabric, although I thin the modern designers/printers chose different colors! The second fabric is now, while not vintage, getting there? Its probably 20 years old. Isn’t that boy cute on it? Next to it is a bell shaped candle holder…there is a battery operated light down in there (see the red?) and its covered with creme and pink heart shaped macaroni! Looks pretty cool in person, lol. Its sitting on a home made doillie (not by me). Next to that is a silicone heart cake pan – love those things…the cake pops right out so you can frost the sides even! In it is the scrap from sequin punching (silver roll), and two baseball cap pencil sharpeners and a “make two bouncing balls” kit. The later tow items are meant for the boys’ door hangers.

The additions to this photo are the crayon erasers, and the three heart tins. I just love crayons in odd shapes! And to get six different colors, well I could not pass those up! In the heart tins – the bottom one has three vintage buttons, including two great face buttons (like betty boop), and a yellow rose. The upper left tin has some spring type buttons/beads in the shapes of flowers, fruit, leaves – these are modern and plastic. The upper right tin has some plastic modern pieces that might be in a cracker box?

The final three items (minus the chocolate packing material – for the boys door hangers again) are the t-shirt for the youngest (I silkscreened that one!), the button wreath/frame (I made that also!), and the crepe paper letters and number packs on the left side.

And I wrote an explanation and included it in the BOX!!! Can you imagine? I can’t – I normally write it up afterwards and email it with a header like – don’t read until package arrives! Of course I forgot to mention that I painted the airplane, or the valentine picks at all. Ah well – overall I did pretty good on this one!

Can you see the bird in this photo sent to my exchange partner? This was from the Cupid’s Workshop I took! Great projects in this online class. I did the bird a bit different-I used florist spray to color my white birds.

I still need to finish the rest – I want to place them in a white tree – thought it would look very spring like!

As you can see in the not very centered photos I made 3 pinks, 1 yellow, 1 blut and 1 lime green bird. The first bird is done and has flown the nest!!!

I signed up for Robyn’s class this weekend (Sunday) at Piecemakers. Great class, great store, great teacher! While I took Sally Jean last fall for soldering you would think I would have confidence but since I managed to burn my hand pretty bad in class (and not on the project or the soldering iron mind you!!!) – I haven’t really worked on soldering jewelry since then.

The best way to get myself going again is to sign up for a class!!!! And this looked great. I had high expectations and Robyn surpassed them. For now here is a photo of the class at work soldeirng outside on a gorgeous day in Southern California…on February 1!

And some not great shots of Robyn’s work but glass is hard to photo because of reflections (at least that is my excuse). Robyn does really great work with tiny bottles and she enhances them with buttons or such on top! She explained how she built the box around the Charlotte on the left side also – I am going to try to make it more “fabric” oriented, although I do have some charlottes small enough to do that I think! And notice those dice on the bottom!!!!

At the International Quilt Festival one of the classes I took was with Traci Bautista. She does very interesting work and it crosses over into all sorts of art forms. This particular class involved taking a pair of jeans and doing something with it. Some students decorated jeans (like me) and others cut up the jeans to make other items – purses, scraves, journal covers, etc.

Some students painted on designs, others stamped/painted/combed onto canvas fabrics and then cut those up and added them to the jean fabric. I had a blast in this class – definitely outside my normal interests. Laura ended up with a fairly funky pair of jeans (we had bought some cheap jeans at Garden Ridge of all places in case this project did not work) from the class. And later I made a pair for each of the girls – Laura, Suzanne and Emily. (After I checked to make sure they would wear a pair. I don’t want to make something they would not wear – I would rather give them a pair of plain jeans then so they could get some use out of them. ) Oh, this time we went to Kohls to get jeans for each of them. (Yes it also helps if the jeans fit, right?)

First photo – examples of Tracis on canvas (to the right and in the back) and a design board example to the right.

Second photo is of Traci demoing in the sewing room. (In the morning we were in a painting room and the afternoon a sewing room. The day before Traci had both rooms all day so she thought that was the setup for our class. Nope as the three of us that worked through lunch found out! There was another painting class in the “painting” room that afternoon so we had to move all the supplies, fellow student’s works, etc. to the other classroom. That was an experience!)

Oh – and the machine she is using is the Janome 6600. Why do I know this? Because I have one of these. Traci has one but as a non traditional type sewer she was unaware of the footlift! I love those knee press foot lifts, don’t you? Also, the Janome rep was so nice – he repositioned these machines so each person still had a place to finish their painting (there were two machines per table and since we were a small class we could each have our own table). Why do I thank him here? Two reasons – these machines are great but HEAVY and I was the teacher’s pet so I would have had to move them, lol.

The last two photos are of fellow students working on their projects! One is diligently (and beautifully) painting a jeans skirt, the other is positioning her painted canvas with the pieces cut into hearts (wish I had looked at these photos before doing the girls – I would have done different shapes on mine!)

One of the best things about Traci is how she uses EVERYTHING! I don’t know if you can see the painting palette of the student – its a piece of transparency film. Or notice the canvas hearts – some have been painted/stamped with household items. Also the other leg was done with the oil crayons and rubbing sheets. Traci travels constantly so her art studio is normally a suitcase.

So I signed up for an exchange in Swapbot on blogging! When I signed up for that my goal was to blog at least every day until February 14. As you can see I am behind! So I am playing catchup tonight since I can’t seem to sleep anyway! This doesn’t count as a blog entry – just a reason to explain all these entries so quickly right now.